Thursday, December 31, 2015

Drunken Boat, an international online journal of
the arts, is one of the world’s oldest electronic journals of the arts. It
publishes works of art endemic to the medium of the web, such as video, sound,
hypertext, digital animation, web art, and multimedia/cross-genre works of art
and letters, alongside innovative works of prose, poetry, translation, reviews,
interviews, and photography. We focus on work that stretches form, irrespective
of aesthetics. We include special folios on such subjects as Native American
Women’s Poetry, Aphasia, and the Black Mountain School, among many others.

Drunken Boat has published established artists and
writers such as DJ Spooky, Norman Mailer, Franz Wright, Kay Ryan and Sol LeWitt
as well as emerging artists and writers. We are also very invested in
international art and literature and have a large worldwide readership. In
addition to the magazine, we have published three books, including Collier
Nogues’ The Ground I Stand on Is Not My Ground and Lisa Russ Spaar's
Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry.

Ravi Shankar (1975-) is the founding editor and
Executive Director of Drunken Boat,
one of the world’s oldest electronic journals of the arts. He has published or
edited ten books and chapbooks of poetry, including What Else Could it
Be (2015), the 2010 National Poetry Review Prize winner, Deepening
Groove, called the work of one of America’s finest younger poets by CT Poet
Laureate Dick Allen, finalist for the Connecticut Book Award Instrumentality
(2004) and Autobiography of a Goddess a forthcoming collection of
translations of Andal, the 8th century Tamil poet/saint, co-edited with Priya
Sarukkai Chabria. Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited W.W. Norton’s Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle
East & Beyond, called “a beautiful achievement for world literature”
by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has won a Pushcart Prize, been featured
in The New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education, appeared as a
commentator on the BBC, the PBS Newshour and NPR, received fellowships from the
Corporation of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the Connecticut Commission on
the Arts, and has performed his work around the world. He is currently Chairman
of the Connecticut Young Writers Trust, on the faculty of the first
international MFA Program at City University of Hong Kong and a Professor of
English at Central Connecticut State University.

1 – When did Drunken Boat first start? How have your original goals as a
publisher shifted since you started, if at all? And what have you learned
through the process?

The
conception for Drunken Boat began in
1999 and we published our first issue in 2000 and the quantum leap that our incipient
vision took from where we began to where we are now would have been
inconceivable to me then and still remains remarkable to me now. We began as a kind
of one-off side project between two old friends, the architect Mike Mills and
myself, and we thought we’d showcase the work of those writers and artists we
admired who we thought weren’t being widely seen, just for our own pleasure.
Little could we have anticipated what publishing online would mean, for soon
after the launch of our first issue, we began receiving work from places as
far-flung as Australia and China. Now Drunken
Boat has a staff of over thirty individuals worldwide and we now publish
books. So we could not have foreseen what we would become and our original
goals have certainly shifted in time. Fifteen years in, it’s time to become
self-sustaining and my own real prerogative is to insure that Drunken Boat has a life well into the
future. What I’ve learned through the process of creating the journal is too
immense to distill briefly, but primarily I’ve learned about managing different
personalities and how to sustain a long running art endeavor on a shoestring
budget, all of the splendor and frustration it entails. Clearly the former
outweighs the latter or I wouldn’t still be doing it.

2 – What first brought you to
publishing?

A
frustration with what I was seeing published, for one, where the most
innovative and challenging works of art were being ignored, but also a sense of
the consanguinity of the arts. Artists in different media share a curatorial
space with writers too infrequently, so we hoped to change that by creating a
garden for true cross-pollination. Having started Drunken Boat with a visual
artist, I really hoped that we might try to use the magazine as a forum for those
kinds of works that couldn’t exist in print. Because our ethos has always been
publishing works of art endemic to the medium of the web, we wanted to publish
multimedia work, work that used the digital as part of its compositional
strategy and we were never interested in replicating the paradigm of the page.
Really we still aren’t. However in 2010, we were brought an interesting
project, which was the posthumous poems of Reetika Vazirani and that was the
kind of project we just couldn’t turn down. That led us down the path of
publishing more books and we plan to do a title or two a year from here on out.

3 – What do you consider the role and
responsibilities, if any, of small publishing?

Small
press publishing is vital to our overall health as a culture. I see an analogy
in the role of microorganisms in the human body. Of course we are always
concerned about those larger vital organs, the liver and the heart and the
spleen, but the body is not an island; instead it’s a complex ecosystem where
bacterial cells outnumber human cells nearly 10-to-1. Microbes, the flora of
the body, are vitally important in everything from our immune system to our respiratory
system, even though you can’t really see them working. Similarly small press
publishing lies under the surface of our culture, nowhere nearly as vast and
recognized as the machinations of mass media, and yet the work that is done
there is vital to creating the environment necessary to complicate those
homogenous, stereotype-reinforcing romantic comedies and party anthems that
pass for shared culture. I think small press publishing gives voice to the
voiceless, allows for experimentation outside the marketplace and ultimately
evolves thinking in a way hard to quantify but impossible to deny.

4 – What do you see your press doing
that no one else is?

Since
its inception, Drunken Boat has
always pushed on the boundaries of the status quo, and so I feel like we have
always wanted to collapse the distinctions of genre, of aesthetic school, of
self-replicating vision. Drunken Boat was
among the first journals to combine literary arts with multimedia expression,
and I still believe we are one of the few venues where web art, sound art,
video, hypertext, interactivity, photo, translation, reviews, poetry,
nonfiction, fiction, and design all converge. We are constantly looking for
those works of art that exist in the interstices between what we might consider
normal literature, for those works of art that either transcend the printed
page or ask difficult questions of the reader/viewer/participant in the meaning
making process. I also believe that our dedication to global literature is
unique; we’ve published writers from Korea, Eritrea, Australia, India and from
various Native American tribes. We also have focused on issues such as aphasia
and exploration that have not found an outlet in other literary venues. Finally
we are dedicated to the egalitarian distribution of the arts, which includes
publishing the work of outsider artists, spoken word poets, true mongrels of
the spirit, alongside Pulitzer Prize winners.

5 – What do you see as the most
effective way to get new chapbooks out into the world?

6 – How involved an editor are you? Do
you dig deep into line edits, or do you prefer more of a light touch?

Again
it depends; sometimes if we see something that has a lot of promise but doesn’t
quite work, we will work closely with the author to make it resonate better.
Our genre editors are terrific at doing this kind of work. In those case, we
might suggest not just line edits but also a different ending, a place to
elaborate or excise, or a new direction to pursue. Other times, we are very
light and just fix typos or lineation issues, but always in consultation with
the author.

7 – How do your books get distributed?
What are your usual print runs?

We
used Small Press Distribution http://www.spdbooks.org/ and though it depends, we do print
runs from 500-1000 copies and are always willing to reprint.

8 – How many other people are involved
with editing or production? Do you work with other editors, and if so, how
effective do you find it? What are the benefits, drawbacks?

We
have a fairly large staff of about 30 individuals from around the world and we
often work with outside Contributing Editors. We love doing this because we can
tap into their expertise which often varies from our own. So for instance, Kristin
Prevallet edited our Trance Poetics folio http://www.drunkenboat.com/db16/trance-poetics in one of my favorite issues; Jean
Jacques Poucel put together the OULIPO compendium http://www.drunkenboat.com/db8/oulipo/feature-oulipo/, which still stands as a monumental
look back at the past and future of creating under constraint; and Kalela
Williams put together a folio on the Affrilchan Arts for us http://www.drunkenboat.com/db20/affrilachian-arts. Without the influence of those
outside editors, we never would have had those rich, diverse folios. The only
drawback is that we have a very specific editorial and design process, and
often times it is difficult to get them acclimated to our process. Sometimes
having outside editors creates a lot of extra work for our staff but we are
getting better at streamlining it.

9– How has being an editor/publisher
changed the way you think about your own writing?

I
have internalized my critical eye and I am constantly amazed by the variety of
what is being published. And so if I wasn’t an editor/publisher, I think I
might have been more content to settle into a comfortable groove doing the same
kinds of things over and over again, writing some version of a familiar lyric
poem, but because I’m constantly being confronted with such a welter of
unexpected approaches to writing that challenge by own preconceptions, I find
that I am forced to evolve in response.

10– How do you approach the idea of
publishing your own writing? Some, such as Gary Geddes when he still ran
Cormorant, refused such, yet various Coach House Press’ editors had titles
during their tenures as editors for the press, including Victor Coleman and
bpNichol. What do you think of the arguments for or against, or do you see the
whole question as irrelevant?

Well
I have always written the Editor’s Message to each issue of Drunken Boat, but that’s the extent of
it, save for exceptions like when I translated Hervé Le Tellier and Jacques
Bens with Laurence Petit for the OULIPO folio http://www.drunkenboat.com/db8/oulipo/feature-oulipo/translators/shankar/shankar.html. I don’t think taking back the means
of production is bad thing and indeed there’s a long history of pamphleteering
that’s currently making a comeback with small presses and blogs, but just
personally, I prefer having the quality of my work judged by someone other than
myself and like Epictetus, I believe we have two ears and one mouth so that we
can listen twice as much as we speak.

11– How do you see Drunken Boat evolving?

After
having run the magazine for 15 years, I’m thinking stepping back to concentrate
on Development and let an energetic new Executive Director take over. We need
to become self-sustaining and concretize what we have laid the roots for over
so many years. Doing book is new for us and we’ve also had conversations about
releasing a sound arts primer with recordings from our live events from around
the world. Perhaps we’ll release this digitally….and on cassette tape. In all
seriousness, the magazine has moved to Drupal and we have a consistent design
team for the first time ever and that will allow us to concentrate on providing
a forum for those works of art that explore the frontiers of form.

12– What, as a publisher, are you most
proud of accomplishing? What do you think people have overlooked about your
publications? What is your biggest frustration?

To
have started on a whim an endeavor that has persisted for so long is of great
pride to me. Much of that is owed to all of the amazing people I have worked
with over the years, each who had their own style and sensibility which is
reflected in the pages. In some ways, our magazine traces our own collective
digital lineage from the infancy of those early lo-fi artworks, those pieces
created in Shockwave and Story Space, to more sophistication. I think what may
be overlooked about Drunken Boat is
how much we’ve accomplished on so small a budget and how much more we could
accomplish with a bigger budget. We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and
we depend upon reader support to survive. Not having consistent funding has
been a source of frustration.

13– Who were your early publishing
models when starting out?

There
simply weren’t any so we just made it up as we went along. Once we realized
that we were actually not just a one-off project but an actual online literary
journal we looked around and realized there were others of us—Alt-X, Eclectica,
The Cortland Review, Big Bridge, Failbetter, and soon after us, Tarpaulin Sky, Blackbird
and wordforword, Softblow and QLRS from Singapore, Jacket from Australia. So we
began to be aware that others were doing something similar to us. My own
editorial experience was certainly shaped from being a reader at the Paris Review when it was in the basement
of George Plimpton’s Eastside brownstone and I has influenced by the seminal
work, particularly with writers interviews, that the journal was doing. But
otherwise we discovered where to go by going.

14– How does Drunken Boat work to
engage with your immediate literary community, and community at large? What
journals or presses do you see Drunken Boat in dialogue with? How important do
you see those dialogues, those conversations?

15– Do you hold regular or occasional
readings or launches? How important do you see public readings and other
events?

Think
I just answered that, but I will add that we do try to have launch events and
try to represent at book fairs and festivals. We have recordings of sound
artist Cary Peppermint at Pete’s Candy Store doing some improvisational avant
bubble gum pop he deemed somewhere on the spectrum between Brittany Spears and
John Cage and photographs of members of the Oulipo convening for dinner in
Brooklyn. These are testament to the sense we have of art and literature being
a living organism.

16– How do you utilize the internet, if
at all, to further your goals?

This
one is self-evident, no? Digitally born and bred to spread new forms: Drunken Boat.

17– Do you take submissions? If so,
what aren’t you looking for?

Yes
we do. We are currently on an editorial hiatus as we transition our staff but
have a number of exciting folios coming up including on the OuTransPo,
Sardinian culture and the Glass House Shelter Project, a remarkable program
bringing college accredited classes to homeless shelters. We are open to almost
everything that is quality, well-conceived and executed, regardless of
aesthetic bent or school of ideation, but we don’t want un-ironic cowboy or
Jesus, unreconstructed pap, overwrought and un-transfigured confession, or
arbitrary experiment that could be just as arbitrarily reordered. Do send us
things we are not expecting: interviews, collaborations, mixed media, archival
projects, global and transnational lyricism, and much more.

18– Tell me about three of your most
recent titles, and why they’re special.

This
one is easy because we only have three titles published so far. Our first book Radha Says are the posthumous poems of
the remarkable and tragic figure, Reetika Vazirani, a manuscript meticulously
reconstructed through an act of literary forensics. Our second, Lisa Russ
Spaar’s Hide-and-Seek Musecollects
the best of her columns from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s
Arts-and-Academe blog on contemporary poetry. Pithy, wise, and insightful,
Spaar’s essays take on everyone from Charles Wright to Brenda Hillman. Our most
recent book won our inaugural first book prize and was chosen by Forrest
Gander. The title is Collier Nogues’ The Ground I Stand on Is Not My Ground and is a provoking collection of erasures with an interactive website to
accompany it. Our fourth collection will be out this fall and it is “Union,”
the best of 15 years of Drunken Boat and 50 years of Singaporean literature and
it will be co-published by Ethos Press. We hope to continue doing a few titles
a year in addition to putting out a magazine that explores and exhibits the
best contemporary art and literature.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
The first published was a novel called Awake in the Mad World. When it finally made print I started acting as a marketer, which pissed me off but was necessary at the time because only small circles in a few North American cities knew of my work and what I was doing. But I met a lot of great people doing the same thing and it became a fine experience. This new book, garbageflower, is a poetry collection. It’s different from my fiction because more and more people are reading my poems. And asking me to read them.2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I’ve written poems since youth. I was encouraged with this early on. My family moved me around a lot so writing in short bursts became habitual. When teachers took notice, I I felt important creatively and kept with it.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
This question reminds me of a friend who has a PhD in Philosophy from Purdue. Very serious cat. Sweet as hell, but so fucking serious. Straight to the point about everything, even if misguided. One thing he said to me a few months ago was, “yeah, when you’re on a new book, you work really fast.” I never paid attention to that. But all things considered, I’ve never spent more than six months on a book. I used to take notes and apply them to a manuscript, but as I’ve done more work I realized as taste buds change, so does process. For me at least. garbageflower came out as largely the same book, even though most of it was written summer of ’09 and poems were added and/or replaced over the six years that led to me getting ready to send it off.

4 - Where does a poem or work of fiction usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I know when a book is happening. But to begin either, it’s always been a line or a character’s sound, tone, voice, what have you. I’ll connect with this sense of Other and then go with it. Each book is so different that I think it helps that I’m patient with what comes to me creatively, rather than force it.5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
Readings I’m comfortable with. I’ve done plenty, in different cities and venues. I do have a few cocktails beforehand usually. My favorite two readings both involved meeting students and answering their questions about the books. Once in New York, the other in New Orleans.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
I just don’t think being alive is super serious, and jobs are dumb, and conflict is avoidable, and chaos is man-made, and having money is dangerous, but the pen on page is necessary. It’s so fucking strange to me that I’ve been like this, philosophically and psychologically. But I TRIED to do so much for meaning in my life when younger, and I THOUGHT so much. I’ve learned since I started publishing that I’m just chronicling my life in each book, poetry or fiction. And whatever theories I may have held about existence, they’re getting clarified through each project. I don’t know a damn thing. Never did. I just play puppeteer to dancing words. That’s cool to me.7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
Currently being a writer, in my opinion, means conserving basic principles of communication. Being a “writer” to a lot of people is equal to being a poor mess. Unless you’re doing some tacky political shit, or you’re writing in some entertainment genre that makes a billion dollars at the box office. I still look at being a writer as necessary, and I believe being a poet in whatever form or capacity is precious and vital.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
One has to find the right editor. When I was first sending out poetry manuscripts, I was tired of sitting on the mountain of good and bad stuff I’d produced. The publisher/editor who picked me up, Peter Jelen at BareBackPress, actually read over the first draft of garbageflower before it was garbageflower, and he liked it but wanted something else at the time. So we ended up developing a relationship that made two other poetry books happen before garbageflower. And he became a great friend because we agreed and disagreed on a lot of shit. I even helped him with some other books he had his hands on. We became partners in the work. So an editor is real and good and lovely. Just gotta get with the most appropriate one for what you’re trying to accomplish. That takes time and searching.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
It’s ok to forgive yourself.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
Awesome question. Man, I was told in grad school I couldn’t do both. And so it was a learning process to turn on and off those brains, until I realized I was misinformed and that I had that ability to do as much of either as I wanted. After that, it was about learning how much time each project required. But writing both, being able to write both that works for the reader (after, of course, it works for me, first), is great because I can push myself on to the page as I feel and know my readers will get it.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I write when I have something going on in the bean. Otherwise I drink and work and listen to music and smile a lot. I don’t do that “oh, I write four hours a day” horse shit. I actually got in an argument with a cat in Florida about how much he thought I should write. I cut him loose as a pal. Everyone is different.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
Beer at the corner store. And I also spend time with friends who I usually don’t see because of how isolated I get.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
I’ve lived in too many places around the country to know that answer. But I was recently in a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains and my friend Steven always had bacon and eggs going in the morning. Our windows were always open. So crisp air there, and promising breakfast smells, yeah, that was home for a bit. I liked that.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Musical rhythm affects my dialogue sometimes. Jazz is in my fiction and poetry. Those beats and stories, the nonverbal loveliness, all that. So good.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?James Baldwin is the best writer I’ve read. And I love the gravity, as well, of Marquez. Dorianne Laux writes poems that connect me to sex and earth and challenged divinity and that’s a pretty fucking awesome feeling. To believe and just coast. 16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Look in the mirror and be proud.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I thought I was going to be a lawyer for a while, then a professor. Then I realized I detested title chasing and I went adrift and accepted what was ahead. If not a writer, I would have gone into business and voluntarily fallen on a sword.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Nothing made me write. It’s like pursuing a meal. Go long enough without food and you go nuts. Go long enough without putting words down, even if they need to be balled up and thrown in the fire, you go nuts.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
I took a long time to get to The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. But as historical context, which is how I perceived it in terms of purpose served, I saw value in it. And concerning the last great film, I dunno. Hollywood sucks. Big Bad Love, in my opinion, is a great movie. Fine attention given to the work of Mississippi writer Larry Brown.20 - What are you currently working on?
I’m 35 pages into a new poetry book. And here in New Orleans the ubiquitous “they” is pushing me to keep with a stage play I started a while back. But it’s dark as night, and I don’t feel dark right now, so it’s poems when I get to them right now. Otherwise I’m working on being ok with life happening beyond my control.

Slow Poetry in America
is a quarterly poetry newsletter edited by Dale Smith, Hoa Nguyen, and Michael
Cavuto. Each issue is printed in Toronto, ON and features one poet, and can be
mailed anywhere in the world. Annual subscriptions ($10) are made on a rolling
basis and will include the next four issues.

Bookstore/Institution
Subscriptions are $25.00 annually and will receive 10 copies of each
newsletter. Please email mcavuto@gmail.com for Bookstore/Institution
Subscriptions.

SPIA subscriptions seek
only to cover the costs of printing & publishing, and do not earn any
monetary profit.

The
first three issues are “GROUND,” by Texas poet Kim Dorman, “8 Poems,” by Philadelphia
poet Marion Bell (June 2015) and “Sound Science: Selections,” by the late Texas
(by way of Panama and New York) poet Lorenzo Thomas (1944-2005) from his 1992 trade
collection Sound Science (October
2015), all of which exists as an introduction to poets I hadn’t even heard of
previously. It is curious to see how Slow
Poetry in America, at least so far, works to bring the work of Texan poets
north of the border (which makes sense, given the decade-plus that Smith and Nguyen lived and worked there), and if this series is one that works as an extension
of their prior work with Skanky Possum, or if it will be working to also engage
with the literary community around them, in their new home in Toronto. Either way,
these are compelling publications, and teasingly small, which can only entice.